


The Five Stages of Going Native

by Jana



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Vague Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 16:17:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1654739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jana/pseuds/Jana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is the one scientist who ever managed to fit in the Night Vale sub-culture. Night Vale is very lucky he did manage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Five Stages of Going Native

**Denial is Not a River Here. The Nile is a Conspiracy, Just like the Pyramids.**

When Carlos was in high school he was taught there are three states of matter, in the same way he was taught that sex happens between a man and a woman and it shouldn’t happen before marriage. He was taught an outdated lesson that skipped all the actually exiting stuff that might have made people pay attention in class. When Carlos was in high school, a random man off the street taught him that the colour magenta was all in his head. This did him a bigger favour than the entire USA education system ever bothered.

Technically speaking it might be a bit mean to call Mr. Mordecai a random man off the street; he was a real, credible teacher after all, it was just that he taught music, not physics. Their physics teacher Mrs. North had broken her leg in a tragic clothing rack accident – that was never elucidated further, much to the disappointment of the entire student body – and the school needed a substitute teacher in a hurry. It took them two days and Mr. Mordecai was bribed to keep the demon spawn colloquially known as “teenagers” silent in their classroom and keep them from complaining to their parents. Because his grasp on what he was supposed to teach to his classes was very shaky, he taught the stuff that interested him personally.

“The best teacher I ever had never could teach me to carry a tune in a bucket,” Carlos used to say before coming to Night Vale. It was a joke and an experiment and it always amused him when people tried to work out how this teacher could be so great if he couldn’t even teach. What he didn’t tell was that his ineptitude saddened him; he had liked Mr. Mordecai and he would have liked to perform better for the man, but the sad truth was that he was an octave removed from totally tone deaf. 

“The best teacher I ever had never could teach me to carry a tune in a bucket,” Carlos told Cecil when the radio host had ambushed him at Big Rico’s and pestered him for a live interview Carlos had no intention of granting the man. It would just encourage Cecil – Mr. Palmer, it was Mr. Palmer – and Carlos wasn’t entirely sure whether he had to worry about stalker walls and winding up as an inspiration for a serial killer TV series or not. Cecil – it was Mr. Palmer! – had a way with, well, him and in general like that. Carlos was only surprised that Steve Carlsberg and the Apache Tracker hadn’t filed restraining orders yet.

(He wasn’t thinking about Telly the Barber and he wasn’t thinking about how he even didn’t know the poor man’s last name. He wasn’t.)

“I’m sure that the bucket was to blame,” Cecil AKA Mr. Palmer said. “Buckets can be devious like that.”

Carlos couldn’t help it, he had to bury his face in his hand to stiffle the giggles. That was the best come-back he had ever heard, hands down. Cecil looked pleased in the vague way that told Carlos the radio host had no idea what he had said that was so fun, but that he was happy to take the credit for it anyway.

“That sounds very Harry Potter. Have you had any great bucket rebellions lately?” he asked and craned his neck to see if his municipally mandated weekly pizza would come soon. He wanted to leave as soon as possible and it wasn’t actually because of Cecil because the man was turning out to be much less unnerving in person than he was on the air. It was just that Big Rico’s was, well, very Night Vale in the same way that taking the lead door off the Radon Canyon had been; very well-meaning and entirely missing the point.

Probably inspired by the new zombie trend, though it was difficult to be certain in Night Vale, the posters in the windows claimed Big Rico’s to be a safe-haven for people to hang out in when the zombie apocalypse would inevitably hit before the Christmas season. Very much counterproductively, the restaurant had been built over an old graveyard. The owner seemed to think that the gravestones randomly scattered throughout the floor space brought him good luck, but it was difficult to not feel unnerved and like a total heel when dining atop of corpses – even though, as he had been assured, it hadn’t been an ancient Native American graveyard. It wouldn’t do to be a racist or anything after all.

“…back in 1925 they talked rebellion and because we didn’t have running water yet, the City Council called for a conscription,” Cecil’s words broke through his musings and it took Carlos a moment to realize that the strong, velvet-soft tone that could _almost_ make him believe in anything over the radio was answering to his question. “Five years from that we had a working pipe system and Old Eb, you know, not that mayor, but the other one, he ended the slavery, but it was a very controversial decision back then. People thought that Liberty was something suspiciously French-sounding and the next thing we would want to break from the Great Old Ones.”

Carlos was not going to ask. He was not going to ask anything and he was going to live in his blissful ignorance until his grant was over and publish the ten percent of his findings that was applicable outside Night Vale.

“I take it that Lovecraft is part of the summer reading program here?” He hadn’t asked that. It had just suspiciously sounded like his voice.

Well, hell. In a bucket too. Damn that sotto voice.

**Anger Leads to the Dark Side (and That’s Sort of Tempting Right Now)**

Carlos wasn’t a botanist and Carlos wasn’t a geologist, but he had long since given up on trying to explain this to the people of Night Vale and he even joked about it on the radio. In truth he was only a physicist and even that was a too-big umbrella term for him. He wasn’t the kind of physicist who studied heat and temperature and their relation to energy and work, for example, and he wasn’t the kind of physicist that studied light and its interactions with matter, despite optics being his first introduction into the field.

His main field of study was electromagnetism and his specialization was plasma physics, the study of charged particles and fluids interacting with self-consistent electric and magnetic fields. This was mainly because it had been such a revelation to find out in high school that most of what was taught him there had been outdated information for ten years or so and partially because it was so difficult; the harder something was to do, the more Carlos wanted to excel at it. But the residents of Night Vale didn't make such distinctions between the various fields of science. If you could call yourself a scientist, you were a Scientist and could be trusted to be able to do anything and everything from seismic surveys to climate research. A human biologist, a mathematician, a meteorologist and apparently an anthropologist too if you wanted to actually thrive.

In this accursed place’s defense, they had certainly heard him talking about the earthquakes-that-weren’t and genetic mutations more than enough to get confused and this was because he was always in-between fellow researchers and undergraduates.

“I didn’t get a girl pregnant in high school!” he yelled to the cruel, howling winds. The cruel, howling winds didn’t deign to answer to him.

“Well, you are a gay,” Marcus Smith told him a little breathily. It wasn’t even the good kind of breathy that was prelude to some very pleasurable activities.

“I didn’t get a girl pregnant,” Carlos continued, not gracing the interruption with an acknowledgement. “I went to university, I became a doctor, I made my mamá and daddy proud. Just why am I huddling on this stupid roof and rethinking my life decisions now?” He had gotten used to eating rye bread and the clocks running on grey matter and imaginary corn, but _how come this was his life?_

Other than grants being hard to get, that was. He had taken the Night Vale post even though he was – he had thought he was – a bit overqualified for it because he had needed an income. 

Carlos was from Boston and there storm meant large hail, heavy downpours and occasionally thunder. While the city had experienced many tornado warnings, it had never actually been hit by one. In Night Vale he had already learned that storm – any brisk wind, really – meant sand, sand, sand everywhere. Sand got into his shoes and socks and under his shirt, it penetrated his hair follicles and it clogged up the shower drain faster than he could say a puddle of mud. Until the bad weather passed, the smartest thing to do would have been to stay out of the wind entirely, so of course he was on the roof of the lab, helping Smith to fasten and clamp and strap down their anemometer, never mind that neither of them was actually a meteorologist. Its mounds had shown signs of metal fatigue and they should have gotten around to fixing it some days ago, really, they were punished for being lazy.

“I hate sand and I hate wind, I hate karma and I hate this ridiculous, sanity-defying town. Breaking the laws of physics should be a finable offense, I would be rich,” he gritted between his teeth. The wind was howling at him and it sounded suspiciously like laughing.

“You and me both, boss,” Smith said and looped the cable tie tighter around the base of the anemometer. “We could hire local minions to do the menial work for us. But look for the bright side of the things – at least it’s just wind and sand and nothing really weird.”

Carlos first thought was: you jinxed us. His second thought was that he couldn’t believe this town had taught him to believe in something as juvenile as jinxes and his third thought was to wonder whether minions had formed unions in Night Vale and what their conditions of employment were. Then the jinx, inevitably, delivered.

First there was just rain and the rain was red. That there was rain at all surprised Carlos more than its colour; red rain was a phenomenon caused by dust or sand blown into the atmosphere and carried by the wind to great distances, eventually mixing with rain clouds and giving color to the rain itself. That part was perfectly explainable, if still rare. Then all of a sudden the entire sky lit up as if someone turned on a light switch in a dark room and the lamp had a red shade. This was immediately followed by a strange metallic type of sound – a monotonic trumpet moan rolling close to the ground underneath the light. This was when a live electric wire was flung by the wind, hit the roof and was lit on fire. Carlos only had enough time to be grateful that the roof was made of corrugated iron when the small flames turned into a spinning vortex of flames that grew higher than ten meters before blinking briefly green and then disappearing entirely.

“What?”

The sand was howling around them, now fiercer than before, and Carlos couldn’t help but notice that the rain had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. What had that been, a Glow Cloud family reunion? And what was he even thinking, there had to be some kind of rational explanation. Fire whirls weren’t an entirely unknown phenomenon, though they usually happened during forest fires…

“You know that you are soon going to be in-between me as well, right?” Smith asked with a trembling voice that was almost drowned out by the wind. Everything around them was hazy and loud and full of sand.

“You know that what you just said doesn’t make any grammatical sense at all, don’t you? And if Cecil says this was some kind of family reunion, I am going to hurt someone.” Night Vale had this effect even on the most peaceful man of science, Carlos had noticed, it made him wonder what would it feel like to just take the cookies, join the dark side and build the damn death ray.

**Bargaining with the Devil Never Ends Well, but Bribing with Cookies is a Different Thing Entirely**

After the Incident of City of the Tiny People, which really hadn’t been one of Carlos’ finest moments, he woke up one morning and realized that he had a boyfriend. And because he had a boyfriend, he had a life in this town beyond the five-year grant he had been allotted and because he had the terrifying, creeping feeling that he was head over heels in love, return-your-late-book-for-you in love, be-your-valentine in love, either he somehow convinced Cecil to leave with him to Boston or he stayed in Night Vale forever and a day.

Yeah, right, if Cecil ever left, he would eat a Hooded Figure, swallow one like a snake swallowed a mouse and starting from the feet just to add to the difficulty. And knowing Night Vale both _forever_ and _a day_ would be taken very literally and beyond the mortal coil. Maybe that wasn’t entirely a terrible thing; he could imagine little kids baking sugary skulls and an altar covered in red roses and calla lilies and the climatically unlikely Night Vale orchids that smelled like almonds and cyanide and a picture of Abuelito Carlos, you know, the ghost that haunts the radio station. It was just that he scared himself, imagining that far into the future. It was just that Night Vale still scared him shitless some days and most nights.

It wasn’t the Glow Cloud and not even the terrible monthly death count that had actually gone 14.03 percent down since his arrival, it definitely was the terrible holidays that anywhere else were happy occasion – at his less rational moments Carlos speculated the Night Vale was the place where forgotten myths and too-brutal-for-Disney fairy tales retired, just like Desert Bluffs was a place for the hot-and-coming teenager dystopic future genre. But he could live with the holidays. He could live with the Dog Park and the other thing he wasn’t supposed to acknowledge and the third thing he wasn’t supposed to acknowledge. He could deal with taking a three-scientist raiding party with him every time he had to visit the library. 

It was the Sheriff’s Secret Police that really got under his skin. He had always been a very politically aware person and the articles he had read of the Chinese camps for the Falun Gong followers and North Korea – everything in North Korea – might colour his reasoning a little, but. 

Never mind the faceless horrors, he just didn’t want to be re-educated, ever. End of conversation. 

It was an entirely rational decision to start baking, of course. 

Coffee cookies were something he used to buy from a little bakery near the campus when he was in university. He hadn’t ever tried to bake them himself, but they were basically just sugar cookies with coffee thrown into the dough and each dark granola had been a burst of blessed, blessed caffeine when there had been just two nights left before an important test and an essay to return. The bakery had made them shaped like little hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, but Carlos didn’t waste time with such frippery. The recipients were hardly going to care either way. 

“Something smells good in here,” Hannah Gilmore said, peeking her head into the communal kitchen. She was Carlos’ seismologist number three and Carlos was wondering how long she would last. The muscles around her eyes had begun to look really tight lately and she had dismantled and reassembled all her equipment at least twice over the course of the first month. 

“You can have one if you don’t tell anyone else,” Carlos promised and Gilmore was cheerfully selfish enough to accept the deal. She snatched a cookie from the plate and nibbled the still soft edges. 

“These are for that radio host, aren’t they? From the Perfect Boyfriend Carlos to Cecil,” she teased him impishly and Carlos found himself wondering if maybe the cookies had been comfort food and favourite drug rolled into one for her as well and if maybe he could keep his underlings longer if he started dealing the goods. His fellow scientists, he had learned, tended to be notoriously bad at both cooking and baking and surviving over a year in Night Vale had taught him that there was no such thing as fighting too dirty; there was only “kicking below the belt” and “municipally approved mood stabilizers.” 

These cookies were already earmarked, though. Half of them were for Cecil, just because, and a few he hid into his own pockets, but the rest he put into a Tupperware container that read Armadillo Gallstones. 

He had another plastic container actually full of armadillo gallstones, carefully gathered from a carcass dropped by the Glow Cloud and waiting until he got a new biologist to analyze the samples Carlos had painstakingly and thoughtfully collected. This box found its place atop the first one in a locked cabinet. Hiding contraband wheat by-products among real samples had become a communal hobby because nothing made of rye or corn quite tasted the same and acorn-flour bagels were just god-awful, but these were made of oats; the whole idea was the opposite of provocation after all. 

Ever since the beginning he had started putting a mug of coffee on the windowsill whenever it was his turn to make a round for the team since he had learned that they were under constant surveillance by the Sheriff’s Secret Police. At first it had been a tic born from awkwardness since he couldn’t quite pretend he didn’t know the man – or woman – was there somewhere. Then it had become a habit. Now he started to offer the mug with a cookie and depending on how much cookies he had in reserve, he started volunteering for the coffee rounds. 

One day out of seven watching him and his team at work was probably the best reality show ever and the other six days watching paint dry would probably have been more fascinating. Carlos figured that his silent watchers couldn’t have enough caffeine and if a little bribing kept him from being re-educated on account of using pens or wondering about the dog park sometimes-ok-sort-of-often, it couldn’t hurt to up the dosage for future good-will. 

**Depression and Support of the Local Business**

Carlos never knew how much he hated people who smiled for no reason before the yellow helicopters landed in Night Vale. Carlos had never known he harboured any communistic leanings, but watching the gaudy StrexCorp logo appear on this, that and yet new building made him gnash his teeth, close his eyes, count slowly to ten and imagine a firing squad taking aim at a faceless, pinstripe-dressed corporate magnate. What really got to him, though, was watching Cecil try and put on a cheerful facade for their dates and fail. If a man could cheerfully report a Street Cleaning Day in real time and fail to smile when talking about a meeting with the new Station Management, some really messed-up stuff was going on. 

And the worst part was that Carlos was helpless. He could fight pterodactyls and rebellious AIs taking over the local home electronics store as their first step for world domination, but how did one fight a giant corporation? 

_How do the hedgehogs do it_ , a voice from his childhood sing-songed in his head. _Really carefully!_

It was a beautiful, sunny morning with the sky as blue as a robin’s egg when he was walking to the local market to buy some orange milk because Cecil liked the stuff, gods alone knew why, and non-imaginary corn for the team barbeque. Allegedly it was to welcome their ophthalmologist number one to the team – and why were they getting an ophthalmologist anyway, he wondered. Someone really was scraping the bottom of the bin this time. In truth the whole affair was to cheer Cecil up some. 

Carlos was so deep in thought that he didn’t even notice he wasn’t watching where he was going before he walked head-first into a woman in the middle of an otherwise empty street. 

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Scientist,” Miss Juniper said, distraught. She was some relative of Cactus July or Julia or Janet or something else that Carlos could never quite remember, and usually she was very bright and elegant young lady. Now her hair was pulled back in a careless bun, loose tendrils sticking out all over and she looked all around like someone had sacrificed her pet poodle. 

“It was all my fault, Miss Juniper,” Carlos admitted sheepishly. “Uh, do you want to talk about whatever is bothering you now?” He asked then because in Night Vale he could. In Boston a woman could be crying her eyes out in a bus and no-one would dare to approach such personal emotion – unless they were the sort that went around ringing people’s door bells and telling them about Jehova – but in this small desert community personal boundaries were in very short supply. 

“Oh, it’s just that terrible StrexCorp. Can you imagine, they want people to start wearing dresses at weddings,” Miss Juniper sniffled and Carlos winced, imagining yet another business with the logo over the door. 

Miss Juniper was a small wedding shop proprietor, which in Night Vale meant body paints with dubious ingredients, ritual knives for blood-letting, whiskey and poppy seeds, velvet bags full of chicken bones and live baby chicks whose livers were used to determine an advantageous wedding date. Clothing, Carlos had learned, was entirely optional for the guests – and the happy couple was always naked. Oh, and then there were the Christian and Muslim minorities, but no-one took those cultists too seriously. Now StrexCorp had decided that because Night Vale so tragically lacked a real wedding store, they were going to bring their own. 

“And you now that they have a way to make people pay for those even if it is by unlawing the traditional weddings. They already unlawed bloodstones!” Miss Juniper wailed. “And they have an opening bargain about getting two magenta bridesmaids’ dresses for free if you buy a wedding dress.” 

Wait a second, Carlos thought. 

“Did you say magenta? That was sort of specific,” he prompted carefully. He would have to ask Cecil and they would have to be careful because StrexCorp wasn’t the kind of monster you could placate with cookies, but maybe… 

StrexCorp had in its unreasonable wisdom decided that Night Vale needed much brighter communal attitude, Miss Juniper told him. The ponies at the pony petting stations tended to die mysteriously so they had decided to try some colour therapy instead and put the fun back in fanciful. At this point Carlos’ head was already hurting, but it got worse. Pink was such a nice, feminine colour with innocent childhood associations, but because their marketing analysts had warned the management that feminists might boycott the store on account of chauvinistic stereotypes, they had decided on magenta instead. And all the bridesmaids’ dresses in the shop, and thusly the town, were now magenta. Logically. Carlos was digging his phone from his pocket before Miss Juniper ceased her tirade. 

“Hey, Cecil, you have wanted to interview me for quite some time, haven’t you?” he asked, not daring to explain his plan when anyone could be tapping the phone. They would have to be careful and the word dress could not be mentioned at any point, but just maybe this would be safe enough to do. 

It was two days before the implementation of the Operation Magenta because they planned it carefully and the plotting cheered Cecil much more than the barbeque. They both knew precisely what to say, but nothing was written down for fear that StrexCorp might get their hands on the evidence. Cecil opened the show with the local news as always and then it was a show time. 

“Tell me, how you decided to become a scientist?” he asked with just the right amount of gushing to his voice. It probably helped that this part didn’t have to be acted at all. 

“It was when my substitute teacher Mr. Mordecai, the best teacher I ever had and the one who couldn’t teach me to carry a tune in a bucket, told me that magenta isn’t a real colour.” Mr. Mordecai would have liked it if he ever found out that his name was used as an authority to combat a totalitarian regime, Carlos thought wistfully. That it was in favour of another totalitarian regime was entirely beside the point. 

“But… we can still see magenta, it’s kind of pink and kind of purple, isn’t it? Is this the same kind of conspiracy the mountains and the river Nile are?” Like a good, hounding journalist, Cecil grabbed the bone Carlos was dangling in front of him. Somewhere, he liked to imagine, a group of market analysts were choking on their own spit. Probably they weren’t because they didn’t understand how Night Vale worked, but it made for a nice image. 

“A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between, but no magenta, you might notice. It’s the only colour lacking from the rainbow. Whereas, when our eyes see colours, they are actually detecting the different wavelengths of the light hitting the retina. Colours are distinguished by their wavelengths and the brain processes this information and produces a visual display that we experience as colour. If the eye receives light of more than one wavelength, the colour is formed from the sum of the input. 

“But when we get red and violet from both ends of the light spectrum at once we could imagine a colour halfway between red and violet in the spectrum, but that would be green – not a very representative colour of a red and violet mix. So instead our brain is forced to invent a new colour: magenta.” 

“But this is terrible news! Did you hear, listeners, this is an ancient spectral conspiracy that has since the beginning of the time sought to convince us that magenta things exist when in fact we have been supporting pirate imaginary object market. For shame, spectrum of light, for shame. I beseech you, good Night Vale citizens; let us put an end to this for good.” Cecil beamed at Carlos and Carlos beamed back as he started spluttering, protesting that maybe it would have been more accurate to say that magenta just wasn’t a spectral colour and letting Cecil to talk over him. 

Somehow he couldn’t feel cheered, though. He smiled because Cecil was smiling his real smile at long last, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe it was because while StrexCorp now had a big store of eyesore magenta bridesmaids’ dresses it couldn’t sell, Miss Juniper surely felt vindicated and Cecil got to feel the special kind of satisfaction that came from causing a catastrophe by acting precisely as ordered, nothing less and nothing more, StrexCorp was still in town and could still declare traditional weddings illegal, could still reign over Cecil. It was but a tiny victory in a big war. 

And Carlos wanted to win all of it. If Night Vale and Desert Bluffs taught him one thing, it was that in this pocket dimension of crazy the loser didn’t get the benefits of Geneva Conventions and if Cecil ever was a loser, it was going to be over his cold, dead corpse. 

**Acceptance is the First Step on the Road to Big Explosions**

When the Glow Cloud spat eighteen copulating hedgehogs on top of Lauren Mallard, Carlos knew that it was going to be a good day. When he was tackled when he walked into his lab, a sack was pulled over his head and he was driven to a nondescript and undisclosed location where Tamika Flynn imperiously informed him that he was going to become their weapons’ supplier, it was a great day already and it wasn’t even noon yet. 

“StrexCorp has to go,” he agreed and grinned. Cecil had once described his smile as a military cemetery and for the first time ever Carlos thought he agreed with that. 

For as far as he could remember, Carlos’ ethics had always forbidden such things as fraud, fabrication of data and plagiarism. The Declaration of Helsinki was a set of ethical principles regarding human experimentation that would get compromised, again, over his cold, dead corpse. Whistleblowing was just damn low, for all that it wasn’t supposed to be a consideration in his field. It wouldn’t have been a consideration in another place, in another time and what whistleblowing he was capable of doing didn’t really relate to science at all and he wasn't going to, ever, end of conversation.

So no, those ethics weren't getting compromised. When it came to some experience of unscrupulous, violent activities, though? Carlos found that he was falling short and he didn’t regret a thing. 

“Do you know what plasma is? Not the kind you find in blood either,” he asked. Video games used plasma to turn the enemies into exploding puddles. In real life plasma made up most of the visible universe and caused all the light making anything visible at all. “The Planet Earth only exists courtesy of the greatest plasma fusion reactor ever, aka the sun. In this case the truth is more magnificent than what imagination could come up with.” Tamika’s face was hungry in the way of a person who didn’t know quite know what they were about to receive, but knew that it was going to be something good. Carlos decided that once this crisis was over, he was going to convert her to the side of the science; they had cookies. 

There could never be too many scientists like Tamika as far as he was concerned with. If the Catholic Church had tried to force her to renounce the Earth being round, she would have made them eat their tonsures. 

"How hot does it get?" she asked and tugged the ragged edge of one of the stickers on her axe. It was disturbingly adorable and Carlos decided to get her new stickers along with the goods because blood was apparently bad for glue.

“Do you know what a stellarator is? The Latin suffix "tor" forms an agent noun and that performs the action of the base word. A motor performs the action of moving you and a stellarator performs the action of being a _star_. The sun's fusion is gravitationally driven. We don't have enough mass to make another on Earth, but here's the thing: gravity is about the weakest force in the universe. Electromagnetism is a lot, lot, lot stronger, and we're so in charge of it that we make it wallow in our pockets and make someone like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake - and that is a sad state of things indeed - to sing for us.” Carlos was overqualified for this post and he was very happy for it. Tamika was capable of stealing him the resources he needed to support his vision. 

Plasma couldn’t be touched without very imminent death by vaporizing and ionizing, but because it was charged, it could be contained in a magnetic field. 

“I can give you plasma. I can give you the power of the sun,” Carlos promised. In high school he was taught there are three states of matter and that had been a big, fat lie, the people in control over his curriculum being lazy. This was the truth and the truth was magnificent. 

“If no-one ever hurts Cecil again, it will still be too soon,” he said. 

And Tamika Flynn smiled. 


End file.
